Four Teenagers Shot, One Fatally, at Housing Complex

A memorial for an 18-year old who was killed on Saturday in an area where gunshots are common and victims are often young.Credit
Damon Winter/The New York Times

The Brooklyn neighborhood may be rapidly gentrifying in some places, where trendy bars cater to displaced Manhattanites and apartment sales have approached seven figures.

Yet there are no million-dollar homes in the shadow of the Marcy Houses, along Flushing Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s crime-troubled northern edge. And when gunfire erupted on Saturday evening, there were few residents who did not recognize the sound, or shake their heads at its deadly result:

An 18-year-old man dead on the scalding summer pavement; a 13-year-old boy critically wounded by a bullet to the neck; and two other boys, 14 and 15, each hit in the leg by bullets.

“The only thing that changes is the faces,” Chuck Xavier, 47, a lifelong resident of the Marcy Houses, said. “It’s sad.”

By Sunday, detectives had narrowed in on a possible suspect who witnesses said fired a semiautomatic pistol at the teenagers as they stood together in front of 472 Marcy Avenue. The cause of the shooting, the police said, appeared to be an increasingly familiar one — a dispute between gangs from rival housing projects.

Even so, his brother Terrence Morales said, “everybody’s going to miss him.” He said Mr. Lopez had many friends and talked of wanting to enlist in the Army. “I don’t know why these things happen,” Mr. Morales, 20, said. “Everybody knew him. He was cool with everyone.”

The police said he and two other victims appeared to have been members of the Young Stackers gang; the fourth victim, the 15-year-old, belonged to the Marcy Gangsters. The two groups were enmeshed in a violent dispute with another gang, Tompkins Get Money, mostly made up of young men from the Tompkins Houses, fewer than two blocks from the crime scene.

Such battles between teenagers — which the police say is often over territory and respect rather than drugs or money — account for many of the city’s shootings, rattling neighborhoods throughout the city.

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“This thing here almost gave me a heart attack,” said a 58-year-old woman who said she had been outside with her 8-year-old granddaughter and heard the gunfire around 6:30 p.m. “Maybe if they had something for kids to do, maybe there would be less shootings.”

The 13-year-old was taken to Woodhull Medical Center, where he remains in critical condition as of Sunday evening.

Police tape still hung by the bloodstained stairs at 472 Marcy Avenue. At a nearby basketball court, a teenager shot baskets and shook his head when asked about the violence.

As the sun set behind the buildings and the air promised a bit of relief from the heat, more teenagers arrived for pickup games a few hundred feet from where Saturday’s shooting occurred.

When the gunfire broke out, many young people from the Marcy Houses were playing a scrimmage game there, part of a two-month-long basketball tournament for 8- to 21-year-olds in the neighborhood.

“It saves them from being involved in a whole lot of other activities that they shouldn’t be involved in,” said Arey Robinson, 50, a former resident of the Marcy Houses who helped put together the tournament. “I’m trying to grab ahold of them before they slip.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 8, 2013, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Four Teenagers Shot, One Fatally, at Housing Complex. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe